see none of Elizabeth's womanly follies. She had an opinion of her own, and was prepared with reasons to sustain it: she never forgot the dignity belonging to her station, and permitted not the greatest man before her in the slightest degree to entrench upon it. She knew no favorites in the discussion of great questions of state policy, and no reign presented more of such questions than her own. Her agents in important enterprises were always judiciously selected; no gilded court butterfly was ever sent to execute a difficult duty. She tolerated no fools about her when she was deliberating on the interests of her throne.

These are facts which deservedly place her among the very first of female sovereigns. But her weaknesses stand out in sad contrast to all these high qualities. She was vain much beyond the ordinary limits allowed to the weaker sex by the courtesy of the stronger. With features so plain that not even self-love could persuade her she was handsome, she yet was exceedingly anxious to be thought beautiful. A passionate admirer of beauty in the other sex, she exacted most mercilessly the homage of the handsomest men in her kingdom, and no miser was ever more covetous of gold than she was of admiration. When the frosts of sixty winters had whitened her locks, and the ploughshare of time had traced many a furrow in the wrinkles of her shriveled cheeks; so that ugliness had not even the small merit of healthy youth to redeem it from the loathings of disgust; she affected all the romantic sensibilities of love-sick sixteen. The smiles and sighs and tears and thousand interesting "femalities," so pretty and engaging in tender damsels who fall in love; all these derived an added lustre from the parchment face of sixty, agonizing for a blush and striving to torture the indurated muscles into an expression of sentimentality. With all a woman's dexterity would she play off one of her favorites against another, and so admirably equalize her tokens of regard that each had just enough of hope to save him from despair, and quite enough of fear to stimulate him to renewed devotion. With a jealousy as cruel as the grave, she allowed no man about her to bestow the affections of his nature upon an object worthy of them, but with lynx-eyed vigilance tracked him in his love, and construed it into an insult to herself. Envious of her own sex, if a lady of the court acquitted herself

well in the lively dance, it was the royal pleasure to enter the lists in a saltatory contest, and the agility of youth yielded the palm to the stately dignity of sixty-nine years, walking with becoming gravity through the slower paces of a minuet. Vindictive when the slightest personal reflection had been made, the fate of Essex (favorite though he was) was sealed from the unfortunate moment when, sick of her caprices, he remarked that her counsels were "as crooked as her carcase.' "Treacherous toward her rival, the unhappy queen of Scots, the policy of state which called for her murder was none the less acceptable because it gratified also the envy that sickened at her beauty.

'Such was Elizabeth, and such the strange intermingling of kingly qualities and womanly weaknesses that made her, as Cecil said, "more than a man and less than a woman."

The next character in importance to the queen was the sagacious and wary Burleigh. A more unimaginative creature than William Cecil, perhaps, never lived. A heart 'less likely by its generous impulses to mislead the judgment never beat in a human bosom. Spenser, the poet, came recommended to him by his royal mistress herself; he had no sympathy with the beautiful creations of his fancy, and treated him with neglect. Military reputation he valued at no more than he could find in the tangible results of a victory. He estimated the genius of a commander by the security the country derived from his conquests, or the coin they brought into her coffers. Calm and taciturn in every condition of state affairs, with a judgment imperturbably cool, and a rigidity of muscle that never betrayed the slightest feeling, he swayed the destinies of England for years in one of the most trying times of her history, and from first to last possessed the confidence and respect of one of the most capricious old women that ever fancied herself lovely. Elizabeth as little thought of flattering Burleigh into a dream of love, or binding him to her interests by the occasional affectation of tenderness, as if he had been chiseled out of marble. This was a game to play with such spirits as Essex and Leicester; but Burleigh was much too sagacious to permit her majesty to think it possible that he knew there was any such thing as love. His abilities made him indispensable: he was aware of it, yet never acted as if he thought so.

The only object he had in view through a long life, was the glory and aggrandisement of England. For these he toiled with indefatigable labor. Take him for all in all, his country never had a better minister of state, and yet his mind was not of the highest order. There was none of the brilliancy or originality of genius belonging to him. There was no enthusiasm which enabled him to appreciate it in others. Still Burleigh was a great man. A survey of the measures of his government, and the consummate prudence with which he conducted them, all stamp him with the impress of true greatness. The difficult questions involved in the establishment of the Protestant faith, the triumphant resistance to the untiring hostility of the then powerful court of Spain, the dexterous opposition to the Papal power exhibited in the professed support merely of liberty of conscience in France and the Netherlands; the far-reaching sagacity that liberally encouraged voyages of discovery and colonization, because it saw that England's strength was to be in her marine; all these, with many other particulars, attest that William Cecil has had few equals among statesmen. This man appreciated Sir Walter Raleigh, and was his friend: probably he was ignorant that the knight had ever been guilty of what has been termed "the vagabond-like occupation" of perpetrating poetry.

Far different from Burleigh was the proud and profligate Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The appreciation of his character that may be made from the representation of the great novelist will not be entirely erroneous. The sad story of Amy Robsart, which has been invested by Scott with so much of melancholy interest, is not all fiction. Utterly unprincipled, Leicester never scrupled at the means necessary to accomplish his end. He hated Burleigh because he could not undermine him in the confidence of Elizabeth: Burleigh repaid his hatred with contempt, but was too politic to betray it by overt acts. Leicester acted for himself primarily. When Raleigh came to court, he found him a royal favorite, possessed of immense influence and power, for a subject. And Leicester loved power not as a means of doing good for his country, but as gratifying pride and furnishing opportunities for revenge. He never scrupled to destroy, that he might build himself on the ruins of his victim. He was one of the most profound

dissemblers that ever lived. Professing devoted attachment to his queen and country, and bearing no small share in her counsels, he yet was secretly intriguing with Spain and the members of the Church of Rome, because he wished to destroy the protestant interest of Cecil. Notoriously profligate in morals and abandoned in his habits, he could again, when occasion required, lay aside his pretended sympathy with Rome, and with the deepest hypocrisy, assume the language of puritanism, and wear the mask of a most self-denying christianity. He wished the aid of Puritans to prostrate Cecil's labors in building up the Church establishment. No man was ever better fitted by nature to play off the plausibilities of insincerity. Of remarkable personal beauty, uncommon gracefulness of manner, ready address, and no deficiency of understanding, he claimed rank by his noble birth, and sustained the claim by his thorough breeding. Perfectly aware of the foibles of the queen, he plied her with a delicate flattery and a devoted gallantry, complimented her caprices as evidence of her wisdom, and, with a dexterity as cunning as it was secret, contrived, under the seeming show of homage rendered to his sovereign, to strengthen his power, by acting on the principle that Elizabeth was a woman before she was a queen. It was as a woman that she made the handsome Leicester a favorite-it was as the queen that she never allowed her confidence in Cecil to falter. Hence, both stood high in her regard, though they were utterly unlike in, all things, and never loved each other.

The only individual who can be said to have shared with. Leicester the particular favor of the queen was Essex. We are inclined to think that less than justice has usually been done to his character. He is ordinarily considered as one who became a favorite rather from personal beauty than from real merit, and sharing the fate of most favorites, but little sympathy has been felt in his misfortunes or his fall. Had he been less honest, he had probably escaped the scaffold at the early age of thirty-four. Essex possessed many noble traits of character, and with some it will be deemed enough to redeem his memory from reproach, that he was too proud to be the slave of a woman's whims, though that woman was a queen. He was sick of the perpetual alterna

tions from lover-like tenderness to royal rage. One day it was all the nauseating affectation of female fondness that a withered old woman of sixty-eight could lavish; and the next, perchance, some tigress-like outbreak of ferocity sentencing him to banishment. He would not, like Leicester, compromise his own dignity by eternally playing the hypocrite and offering the incense of flattery to the queen; and, as has already been stated, it was the honesty of his language, giving offence to a woman's self-love, that made her relentless and sent him to the block.

Between Essex and Raleigh there were strong bonds of sympathy. Both loved letters, both were generous, both were brave, both were fearless in speech. In the collisions of a court, it happened at times (as might be expected) that they came together in conflict; but each respected the other. When Essex had the command in an expedition that proved disastrous, Raleigh, who served under him, with a noble generosity rejoiced in his own partial success, because it would in some degree" mitigate the censure which he knew awaited Essex from his royal mistress. So, too, when Essex and that arch deceiver Robert Cecil (Burleigh's son) were at variance, and the cunning of the latter was an overmatch for the rash frankness of the former, it was Raleigh who stepped in and reconciled them. It has, indeed, been supposed that Raleigh contributed to the condemnation of Essex. He was far less instrumental than Robert Cecil in the production of that event, and at the execution it was Raleigh, not Cecil, who wept at the untimely end of a noble spirit. But all the courtiers around the queen could not have saved Essex from the resentment of Elizabeth's wounded vanity. He had called her carcase crooked, and so it was, but that only sealed his fate.

These were some of the men with whom Raleigh was now to act; but these belonged to one class only. There were others whose pursuits were more in unison with some of his tastes. He was always a student; never did he go upon the sea without his books, and in the camp his library was always a part of his equipage. Even in the most active periods of his life, it was his custom to read four hours a day, and the uncommon versatility of his mind enabled him to find interest in every path over which he traveled in the wide field of letters. Skilled in mathematics,